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icepixieWell, I suppose I knew this was going to happen sooner or later. The real question is how I resisted for so long. I haven't really watched S3/4 in an age, so my characterization here is basically going off a rewatch of "Strange Bedfellows" earlier this week. Hopefully I didn't do too badly with them.
Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
deborah_judge for the conversation that led to this being written, and whose excellent "Star of the Sea" provided some of my headcanon for Ray and Stella's marriage. This takes place four or five years before they appear on the show.
Title: Begin the Beguine
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: RayK/Stella (pre-canon)
Word Count: 1800
Summary: When they dance, Ray and Stella transform.
One thing he loves about dancing that he'll never tell Stella is that he gets to be in control. He raises his arm, she spins; he steps forward, she steps back; he wants to promenade or corte or send them in another direction, she follows his lead. He just has to put the lightest pressure on her back, or push forward, transferring his momentum to her through the delicious contact of their centers. In the Standard and Smooth dances, you're supposed to be able to put a sheet of paper between your torso and your partner's, and stay close enough that it never has a chance to fall. Since he was thirteen, he's never let that imaginary sheet of paper fall, not when he's dancing with Stella.
In the rest of their lives, it's totally different. She's the smart one; that "J.D." after her name says as much. She was the one who figured out how they could still manage to eat when she was making peanuts from a research fellowship in law school and he wasn't doing much better in his first years on the force. When they finally started making enough money to actually have a choice of apartments, she was the one who called all the landlords to set up viewings, dragging him along behind her so he could offer his opinion. (He didn't care if they lived under a bridge as long as Stella was with him. Well, okay, he needed the stereo so he could dance with her, and bridges don't usually come with electricity, but other than that, he didn't care.) It's not that he's helpless—he'd survived for her first two years at Northwestern, when she was living in the dorms and he had his own place, and he does his share of the laundry and cleaning and cooking (Stella's a terrible cook)—but she's really good at figuring these things out, making plans and making them work, and it's just easier to let her take over. Besides, she enjoys all that big-picture stuff; she's always saying, "In five years we'll," or "Ten years from now we should," and it'll be something big, like buy a house or have some crazy amount of money saved for retirement.
He's in charge of the details she'd otherwise let go: he reminds her to eat when she's brought home a thousand pages of case notes to go over, and takes her on night drives with the windows down, so she can feel the wind in her hair. He puts on something with the right beat, takes her in his arms, and dances her all around the apartment.
Another thing he loves about dancing that he tells Stella all the time is that she transforms when she dances. When there's no music, she moves confidently and sexily (there is never a moment when Stella isn't sexy, and if anyone says otherwise he'll kick 'em in the head), but when she's dancing to a rumba or a cha-cha she's hot on a whole new level. Those dances, the Latin ones, basically exist to show off a woman's hips, and she can move hers with the best of them. He doesn't have to do all that much—most of his steps are just the basic over and over again while she spins and twists and curls her free arm like a charmed snake, all those little details that turn it from just a shuffling of feet into a dance—so he can spend a lot of time watching her. She mesmerizes him, that's for sure; he leads her into an alemana or sliding doors and barely remembers to breathe, much less what to do after.
He knows the hip motion makes her feel sultry. (That was the word she'd used, back when they were teenagers and would spend hours practicing the figure-eight movement until it felt right, that one stretch and flex of the abs translating all the way down his leg, snapping his knee and foot into place for a long, long beat before he rolled his weight back onto his rear leg and did it all again, over and over.) And that sultriness (it's a good word) shows on her face, in the tilt of her shoulders, in the tips of her fingers when she extends them during a New Yorker or a Samba walk. Sometimes she looks at him from under her lashes, just a hint of a smile on her face, and goddamn, it's like having sex in public.
There's a reason he likes the Latin dances best.
Right now, Stella's at the kitchen table, taking notes on her notes on her notes, as far as he can tell, for a big robbery trial coming up next week. She's been at it for hours, and his neck is cramping in sympathy. He walks over to the stereo and pulls a CD from its case, slipping it into the machine. He selects the right track, and Queen pours out of the speakers, guitars and hand-claps setting the rhythm before Freddie Mercury starts singing about a crazy little thing called love. Stella raises her head at the sound.
He hustles across the room to the table and holds out his hand. "Dance with me?"
"The people downstairs are going to hate us, doing swing at ten o'clock at night," she says.
"Song's only three minutes long. Come on, you need a break."
She raises her eyebrow, but tosses her pen on the table and takes his hand.
*
One thing she loves about dancing that she'll never tell Ray is that she doesn't have to be in charge. Between them, she's usually the practical one, always has been, and she likes it that way. She hates being unprepared, and she's making a name for herself at work because she's always the one who knows every last detail, even the supposedly irrelevant ones, about the cases she's working on. She can't imagine anything more embarrassing than being caught unprepared in front of a jury, and it bleeds over into the rest of her life. In their marriage, she's the ground wire—and Ray's the electricity that makes grounding worthwhile.
But when they're dancing, Ray is the one who has to deal with the practicalities of making sure they don't run into anyone as they travel around the floor, or keeping their steps small enough that they don't bump into any of the furniture when they're dancing around the apartment. She helps, of course, squeezing his hand and telling him to watch out for the couple two inches behind them or the chair he's about to run into, but most of the time she can just concentrate on the position of her arms, on the arch of her back, on keeping her balance when he's spinning her a dozen times across the floor. (That's a step they came up with when they were kids, screwing around to some jive music after a lesson. She loves to spin when she's dancing with Ray, because no matter how dizzy she gets, he'll always catch her, hold her up and lead her back into a set of basics until she gets the ground back under her feet.)
Ray's an excellent lead, and she tells him this whenever she thinks his head won't swell too much from it. She's danced waltzes and tangos with partners who were afraid to get as close as you have to in order to actually communicate through your bodies. Ray's never been afraid to push his pelvis right up against hers, to hold her so that there's no mistaking what he wants to do.
Off the dance floor, he goes along with what she decides more often than not, because he just doesn't care as much as she does about how they're going to juggle that unexpected transmission repair bill or when they're finally going to replace that hideous hand-me-down sofa. But he'll think of the things she never seems to have time for: he'll take her for a drive along the water in the newly-repaired car, and rent a movie to watch on the new sofa. (Which they won't actually see much of, because first he'll start kissing her neck, and then they'll wind up using that sofa for purposes it was never designed for.) If she says she wants to get better at a particular dance, he'll collect every tape and CD they own with a song that has the right beat and spend a Saturday afternoon dancing with her.
They both like pushing each other to get better, to master this step or perfect that piece of technique. When she was fourteen, he told her point blank that her foxtrot heel turn was shit (which it was) and then practiced it with her a hundred times until she burned it into her muscle memory. She's put her hands on his hips and twisted him back and forth until he got the swivel right for the time step. He sometimes lets his technique on that get sloppy, and she's sure it isn't because he doesn't remember the correct way to do it. But she enjoys the review as much as he does.
Sometimes she'll take a break halfway through a song, feigning exhaustion (it's not always fake; Ray has this reserve of energy that she can never seem to deplete no matter how hard she tries) just so she can watch him. He's always graceful, lithe and catlike, but when he dances, he grounds that fluidity in the textbook straight-backed, square-shouldered male dance frame, and there's something incredibly sexy about it. She watches him, and her breath catches in her throat.
Right now, that nervous energy and effortless grace are on display as he wanders around the apartment, picking things up, putting them down, staring out the windows with a sigh. The police versus fire department baseball game they were going to cheer at this afternoon got rained out, and both of them are at loose ends. She gets up from her perch on the sofa and walks over to the stereo, where she selects a CD, puts it in, and hits "play."
Ray relaxes the moment the first note emerges from the speakers. She doesn't even have to ask if he wants to dance, because he's already holding out his hand for her. "Sinatra, huh?" he asks as he pulls her close, his other hand coming to rest in its usual place just under her shoulder blade.
"It seemed like that kind of day," she says as he steps forward, and she follows his lead.
End
N.B. that only dance nerds like me will care about: Canonically, the only dances we see Stella and Ray do are a Viennese Waltz on the boat and an American Rumba to "De Cara a la Pared." It just so happens that I think these are the two most annoying dances ever, and so I had them do, well, just about anything else. ;)
Thanks to
deborah_judge for the conversation that led to this being written, and whose excellent "Star of the Sea" provided some of my headcanon for Ray and Stella's marriage. This takes place four or five years before they appear on the show.Title: Begin the Beguine
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: RayK/Stella (pre-canon)
Word Count: 1800
Summary: When they dance, Ray and Stella transform.
One thing he loves about dancing that he'll never tell Stella is that he gets to be in control. He raises his arm, she spins; he steps forward, she steps back; he wants to promenade or corte or send them in another direction, she follows his lead. He just has to put the lightest pressure on her back, or push forward, transferring his momentum to her through the delicious contact of their centers. In the Standard and Smooth dances, you're supposed to be able to put a sheet of paper between your torso and your partner's, and stay close enough that it never has a chance to fall. Since he was thirteen, he's never let that imaginary sheet of paper fall, not when he's dancing with Stella.
In the rest of their lives, it's totally different. She's the smart one; that "J.D." after her name says as much. She was the one who figured out how they could still manage to eat when she was making peanuts from a research fellowship in law school and he wasn't doing much better in his first years on the force. When they finally started making enough money to actually have a choice of apartments, she was the one who called all the landlords to set up viewings, dragging him along behind her so he could offer his opinion. (He didn't care if they lived under a bridge as long as Stella was with him. Well, okay, he needed the stereo so he could dance with her, and bridges don't usually come with electricity, but other than that, he didn't care.) It's not that he's helpless—he'd survived for her first two years at Northwestern, when she was living in the dorms and he had his own place, and he does his share of the laundry and cleaning and cooking (Stella's a terrible cook)—but she's really good at figuring these things out, making plans and making them work, and it's just easier to let her take over. Besides, she enjoys all that big-picture stuff; she's always saying, "In five years we'll," or "Ten years from now we should," and it'll be something big, like buy a house or have some crazy amount of money saved for retirement.
He's in charge of the details she'd otherwise let go: he reminds her to eat when she's brought home a thousand pages of case notes to go over, and takes her on night drives with the windows down, so she can feel the wind in her hair. He puts on something with the right beat, takes her in his arms, and dances her all around the apartment.
Another thing he loves about dancing that he tells Stella all the time is that she transforms when she dances. When there's no music, she moves confidently and sexily (there is never a moment when Stella isn't sexy, and if anyone says otherwise he'll kick 'em in the head), but when she's dancing to a rumba or a cha-cha she's hot on a whole new level. Those dances, the Latin ones, basically exist to show off a woman's hips, and she can move hers with the best of them. He doesn't have to do all that much—most of his steps are just the basic over and over again while she spins and twists and curls her free arm like a charmed snake, all those little details that turn it from just a shuffling of feet into a dance—so he can spend a lot of time watching her. She mesmerizes him, that's for sure; he leads her into an alemana or sliding doors and barely remembers to breathe, much less what to do after.
He knows the hip motion makes her feel sultry. (That was the word she'd used, back when they were teenagers and would spend hours practicing the figure-eight movement until it felt right, that one stretch and flex of the abs translating all the way down his leg, snapping his knee and foot into place for a long, long beat before he rolled his weight back onto his rear leg and did it all again, over and over.) And that sultriness (it's a good word) shows on her face, in the tilt of her shoulders, in the tips of her fingers when she extends them during a New Yorker or a Samba walk. Sometimes she looks at him from under her lashes, just a hint of a smile on her face, and goddamn, it's like having sex in public.
There's a reason he likes the Latin dances best.
Right now, Stella's at the kitchen table, taking notes on her notes on her notes, as far as he can tell, for a big robbery trial coming up next week. She's been at it for hours, and his neck is cramping in sympathy. He walks over to the stereo and pulls a CD from its case, slipping it into the machine. He selects the right track, and Queen pours out of the speakers, guitars and hand-claps setting the rhythm before Freddie Mercury starts singing about a crazy little thing called love. Stella raises her head at the sound.
He hustles across the room to the table and holds out his hand. "Dance with me?"
"The people downstairs are going to hate us, doing swing at ten o'clock at night," she says.
"Song's only three minutes long. Come on, you need a break."
She raises her eyebrow, but tosses her pen on the table and takes his hand.
One thing she loves about dancing that she'll never tell Ray is that she doesn't have to be in charge. Between them, she's usually the practical one, always has been, and she likes it that way. She hates being unprepared, and she's making a name for herself at work because she's always the one who knows every last detail, even the supposedly irrelevant ones, about the cases she's working on. She can't imagine anything more embarrassing than being caught unprepared in front of a jury, and it bleeds over into the rest of her life. In their marriage, she's the ground wire—and Ray's the electricity that makes grounding worthwhile.
But when they're dancing, Ray is the one who has to deal with the practicalities of making sure they don't run into anyone as they travel around the floor, or keeping their steps small enough that they don't bump into any of the furniture when they're dancing around the apartment. She helps, of course, squeezing his hand and telling him to watch out for the couple two inches behind them or the chair he's about to run into, but most of the time she can just concentrate on the position of her arms, on the arch of her back, on keeping her balance when he's spinning her a dozen times across the floor. (That's a step they came up with when they were kids, screwing around to some jive music after a lesson. She loves to spin when she's dancing with Ray, because no matter how dizzy she gets, he'll always catch her, hold her up and lead her back into a set of basics until she gets the ground back under her feet.)
Ray's an excellent lead, and she tells him this whenever she thinks his head won't swell too much from it. She's danced waltzes and tangos with partners who were afraid to get as close as you have to in order to actually communicate through your bodies. Ray's never been afraid to push his pelvis right up against hers, to hold her so that there's no mistaking what he wants to do.
Off the dance floor, he goes along with what she decides more often than not, because he just doesn't care as much as she does about how they're going to juggle that unexpected transmission repair bill or when they're finally going to replace that hideous hand-me-down sofa. But he'll think of the things she never seems to have time for: he'll take her for a drive along the water in the newly-repaired car, and rent a movie to watch on the new sofa. (Which they won't actually see much of, because first he'll start kissing her neck, and then they'll wind up using that sofa for purposes it was never designed for.) If she says she wants to get better at a particular dance, he'll collect every tape and CD they own with a song that has the right beat and spend a Saturday afternoon dancing with her.
They both like pushing each other to get better, to master this step or perfect that piece of technique. When she was fourteen, he told her point blank that her foxtrot heel turn was shit (which it was) and then practiced it with her a hundred times until she burned it into her muscle memory. She's put her hands on his hips and twisted him back and forth until he got the swivel right for the time step. He sometimes lets his technique on that get sloppy, and she's sure it isn't because he doesn't remember the correct way to do it. But she enjoys the review as much as he does.
Sometimes she'll take a break halfway through a song, feigning exhaustion (it's not always fake; Ray has this reserve of energy that she can never seem to deplete no matter how hard she tries) just so she can watch him. He's always graceful, lithe and catlike, but when he dances, he grounds that fluidity in the textbook straight-backed, square-shouldered male dance frame, and there's something incredibly sexy about it. She watches him, and her breath catches in her throat.
Right now, that nervous energy and effortless grace are on display as he wanders around the apartment, picking things up, putting them down, staring out the windows with a sigh. The police versus fire department baseball game they were going to cheer at this afternoon got rained out, and both of them are at loose ends. She gets up from her perch on the sofa and walks over to the stereo, where she selects a CD, puts it in, and hits "play."
Ray relaxes the moment the first note emerges from the speakers. She doesn't even have to ask if he wants to dance, because he's already holding out his hand for her. "Sinatra, huh?" he asks as he pulls her close, his other hand coming to rest in its usual place just under her shoulder blade.
"It seemed like that kind of day," she says as he steps forward, and she follows his lead.
N.B. that only dance nerds like me will care about: Canonically, the only dances we see Stella and Ray do are a Viennese Waltz on the boat and an American Rumba to "De Cara a la Pared." It just so happens that I think these are the two most annoying dances ever, and so I had them do, well, just about anything else. ;)
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no subject
Date: 2011-01-28 09:58 pm (UTC)In their marriage, she's the ground wire—and Ray's the electricity that makes grounding worthwhile.
Aww. And, well, exactly.
He's always graceful, lithe and catlike, but when he dances, he grounds that fluidity in the textbook straight-backed, square-shouldered male dance frame
That is a really interesting way of describing him - it would never have occurred to me and feels very right.
his neck is cramping in sympathy
And that's just sweet. Ack, they are so good together. (::needs to undivorce them::)
no subject
Date: 2011-01-28 11:14 pm (UTC)It's just so clear here how well they compliment each other and how much they enjoy being together. Their physical connection is so strong.
Yeah. I mean, I'm sure it's not all perfect--they did get divorced, after all--but they look really comfortable dancing together on the show, and it must mean a lot to them, if Ray paints step charts on his floor, sheesh.
I feel like they'd be that couple who has all the in-jokes with each other but somehow aren't annoying about it, so it comes off as cute rather than irksome, and just heightens the sense of how much joy they take in each other.
That is a really interesting way of describing him - it would never have occurred to me and feels very right.
I feel like it's fairly common fanon to describe RayK as naturally sort of...sinuous, wiry, words like that. But the ideal in ballroom and latin dances is for the lead to basically mold himself into a T-square, but still be able to bend at the waist--so that kind of catlike movement is good, but it has to be contained. CKR doesn't have the very greatest form in the two dances we see (understandable, since he's an actor, not a pro dancer), but I took some poetic license because I think if Ray really did take a lot of dance classes, that's how his form would look.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-30 04:16 am (UTC)Veery interesting! I'm trying to picture this...but you're right, it does make sense for him.
Speaking of which:
these are the two most annoying dances ever
Could you explain why in a way that is comprehensible to a total non-dancer? Now I'm curious.
Oh, also, this image: he's never let that imaginary sheet of paper fall
SERIOUSLY BURNING HOT LIKE FIRE. Um. I may have forgotten to mention that the other day. But, gah.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-30 05:13 am (UTC)YouTube to the rescue! :) This is a Quickstep, which is the best of the Standard dances for illustrating the combination of straight back/square shoulders that's still very flexible at the waist (you need to be if you're going to take the floor-sweeping steps that are expected). Rather than a straight back, the women/follows are expected to have an arched back, which is all the better for pushing your pelvis up against your lead's. (That's where 90% of the communication between partners takes place; if the lead is very good, the follow should find it nearly impossible to resist doing exactly what he wants. When my team's coaches danced with me, it was like they were moving my legs for me.)
This is an International/Latin Rumba, which still mostly uses that straight-but flexible frame, though there's more shoulder movement allowed.
Could you explain why in a way that is comprehensible to a total non-dancer? Now I'm curious.
Sure! (Heh, if you couldn't tell, I love talking dance.) Viennese Waltz I can't stand because--at least at the level I learned it to--it's so, so boring. You basically do this one step all the way around the floor--step back while turning, step together, step forward/turn, step together--and if you get really dizzy, you can do another brief step to change your direction of rotation. That's it. It's also really, really fast, and it's easy to get dizzy. I almost fell in a competition once, and it wasn't pretty. There are more steps at higher levels, but significantly fewer than the other Standard/Smooth dances. It's a dance that becomes more about endurance than artistry or creativity.
(Note: at the levels I was competing/learning at in college, there's what's called a syllabus for each category. You can put these steps together in any way you want, but can't do anything that's disallowed at your level. You can do more stuff as you progress through the categories, which happens as you win competitions in your current category. So there was never any danger of me going from Bronze to Silver. ;) Once you get to the Open levels, you can start making up stuff, but I was definitely never good enough to compete at that level.)
Anyway, American Rumba I hate because it's so much less attractive than International Rumba. The International basic looks like this, and American Rumba's basic is an incredibly boring, boxy thing in comparison. I think my biggest problem with it is that you have to put your feet together for one of the four counts, which I feel like just destroys any fluidity and momentum (which is like the whole point of Rumba), whereas with International you get to keep your feet apart during the basic and most of the other steps. Granted, American Rumba does get some more interesting steps at the far end of the Bronze syllabus, but my main experience was with the first six or seven, all of which are built on that ugly, boxy basic step.
SERIOUSLY BURNING HOT LIKE FIRE. Um. I may have forgotten to mention that the other day. But, gah.
Yay! :D (I must say that the image is...significantly less hot when you're actually acting it out, and just becomes kind of That Thing You Have to Do In Order to Dance Well, but I do like the way it works in fic between people who actually like each other sexually. *g*)
no subject
Date: 2011-01-29 03:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-29 04:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-04 06:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-04 07:12 pm (UTC)(Married couples can be sexy too!)
Oh, absolutely. (If only TV would understand that...)